Tuesday, August 09, 2016

Playing The Long Game Inside Tim Cook's Apple | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Apparently unaware of the many sleep-related iOS apps...

"The experience now being sold by Apple has expanded far beyond that. As Cue says, grinning at the ambition: "We want to be there from when you wake up till when you decide to go to sleep." Cook himself is only slightly less brash. "Our strategy is to help you in every part of your life that we can," he says, "whether you’re sitting in the living room, on your desktop, on your phone, or in your car."

It’s impossible to understand Apple’s future, and Cook’s challenge, without acknowledging that the experience Apple sells today is not just a collection of devices, but a web of hardware, software, and services that is itself connected to other webs of apps and services made primarily by other companies. These other webs include everything from the "app economy," which already runs on Apple software and devices, to emerging ones such as the connected home and car as well as wearable computing. To achieve its goal of serving its customers all day long, Apple must do more than ensure that its own products work brilliantly—it also must attempt to make them work seamlessly with these many other disparate networks. It must be a notable, reliable player in ecosystems that it doesn’t own itself."